Steam phishing targets video game players

Graham Cluley
@gcluley

Steam, the world’s largest online gaming platform, is increasingly being targeted by phishers trying to steal credentials from its 30 million users.

If you’re not familiar with Steam, just imagine something like iTunes – but for PC and Mac video games.

If you’re interested in digitally downloading video games for your computer, Steam is likely to be your destination.

Phishing attacks against Steam users are nothing new – they’ve been around for a couple of years – but as more and more users jump onto the Steam bandwagon (train?) phishers have greater chances of success.

Here’s one example of a Steam phishing email, intercepted by SophosLabs, which was sent to an email address that has never registered for a Steam account:

Subject: Warning! Your steam account will be suspended?

Although it looks like the link will take you to the real Steam website, the HTML actually directs you to a phishing site. Our spam researchers...

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.

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